A Mailbox at Midnight

The first thing he knew was a mailbox.

It stood at the edge of a lit room on the left wall, between a dining room he had never seen and a stretch of beach at night: a black mailbox on a post, leaning a little, with snow on its lid. Andy had walked past that post every school morning for years. He stopped so short his heel scuffed the stone. Horun stopped a step ahead and waited.

The next room along was the same street in summer. Twin Yews Road ran away under heavy trees, and the light on it was the gold of a late afternoon, thick with pollen. Nobody was in it. A little farther on, the bike rack outside the old elementary school stood in a gray morning with three bikes chained to it, and the blue one stopped him before he could have said why. Then Willow Run in spring, brown and fast and high, the willows standing in it.

They weren’t all together. A Hotel breakfast sat between two of them, and a night on the dunes with a fire on it, and they came in no order he could follow. But they were his—a gas station sign with half its letters out, the library steps, a back fence with a gap in it that two kids could get through and a grown man couldn’t.

Andy’s throat had gone tight. “That’s home. That’s Warrenville.”

Horun said nothing.

Summer light lay across the corridor floor. He heard the river before he saw it—not the roar it made in spring, but the low, lazy sound of August, when it barely had the strength to carry a leaf—and when he reached the sill there it was: brown-green and slow, a bank of willows on the far side, and the raft.

He’d have known the raft anywhere. Milk crates, lashed together with twine nobody had asked to borrow, and a square of plywood on top that never once sat flat.

Andy shook his head slowly. “That’s the raft. We built that.”

He stepped in.

He was standing among the willows. The ground under her shoes was soft and dark, and the long leaves hung all around her and moved against her shoulders, and she stood very still among them in the green shade, where the light came through in pieces. Across the water, in the sun, the raft was going down.

It went by one corner. From the raft it had felt like all at once; from here it wasn’t. The near corner went first, slowly, and the plywood tipped, and the water came up over the edge in one smooth brown sheet. Two kids were still on it. A thin girl with a black bob, all elbows, on her knees at the high end with both hands out—Emi, thirteen, crying already, her face crumpled up—and a skinny boy in a striped T-shirt, standing, arms out for balance, his feet wide on the tilting board.

Andy had never seen himself from the far bank. He hadn’t known he had been that small.

The sketchbook was in the water. It had slid off the low edge when the raft tipped, and it lay flat on the surface, turning a little, the cover going dark as it drank the river in. It drifted away from them on the slow current, toward the willows.

“My book—” Emi’s voice came across the water late, after her mouth had already moved. “My book, my book—Laura—”

“Laura!” the boy yelled. “It’s going under, it’s—Laura, the book!” He was holding the raft together desperately, both hands grasping two ends of twine, a valiant effort Andy knew was going to fail miserably shortly after.

Laura was on the bank they’d pushed off from. She had stayed there, because she hated getting her hair wet, with the loose end of the twine still wrapped around her fist. Eleven. Long black hair tied back with a rubber band. But when Emi called, she did not stop. She didn’t look at the water first, or at anybody. She let go of the twine and went in off the bank in her clothes, and the river closed over her.

Arabella moved.

She started forward before anything had been decided. Andy felt that. Her weight went onto the front foot. One shoe went down off the bank into the shallows, and the cold came in over it, through the canvas, through the sock, cold all the way to the ankle. It was the first thing he had ever felt her do fast.

Then she stopped.

She stood with one foot in the river and one on the bank. The water moved around her ankle. Her hands had come up a little from her sides, and they stayed there, open, and went no farther. Out on the river there was nothing where Laura had gone in. Brown water. Sun on it. The sketchbook still turning, and Emi’s crying coming across late, and the boy on the raft yelling a name.

It went on. It went on far longer than it could have. Andy couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t breathing, and he was inside the not breathing with her, and the river was so slow and so wide that nothing on it moved at all.

Laura came up in the middle of the river with her hair flat to her head and her mouth open for air, and the sketchbook in both hands over her head, held high and clear, as if the water were the only thing in the world that could hurt it.

Arabella’s breath went out of her. All of it, at once, through her mouth. The memory ended there.

Andy was in the corridor, his right foot planted forward, as though he’d meant to go after it too. He looked down at his shoe. It was dry.

His voice wasn’t steady. “She went in. She put her foot in the water. She was going to—” He stopped. “She was watching over her.”

Horun stood beside the sill with the summer light along one side of him. He did not say anything.

Andy turned to Horun. “I every second of that. From the raft. I could tell you which way the current turned the book. I could tell you what Emi said, word for word. I was standing up looking straight at that bank the whole time.” He swallowed. “I never saw anyone over there, not once.”

Emi had said twelve minutes, her first night in the Suite, and he’d said more like two. From the willows it had taken longer than either.

Then something else came back to him: the Inner Gardens at night, Laura beside him on the path back to the Suite, both of her, the lit windows ahead. Arabella said something weird tonight, she’d said. She said I was always all-or-nothing, “even as a girl.” But then she tried to play it off. And he had told her time was funny here, that Arabella could have watched them anytime at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if she watched us at the footbridge, the day you—

He hadn’t finished it. He had been wrong about the footbridge.

Andy turned back to the willows. They had already gone still in the wall, as if nothing in them had ever moved: the river flat, the girl in it with her arms over her head.

“Even as a girl,” he said, mostly to himself. Horun moved, and Andy followed him.

---

He smelled it before there was anything to see: rubbing alcohol, and floor wax, and the scorched dust of a radiator running in the first cold week of the year. It came down the corridor from somewhere ahead on the right, and it was so ordinary that Andy stopped walking.

The window it came from sat low in the wall. Paper snowflakes were taped to the inside of the glass, cut by children with blunt scissors, their points more torn than snipped. Past them he could see a cot with a paper sheet over it, a scale with sliding weights, a sink in the corner and a half-open door beside it onto a bathroom hardly bigger than a closet. A radiator ran under the window, painted the same green as the walls.

He had been in that room before. He stood at the sill a moment, but he couldn't figure out why it would be here.

He stepped in.

The radiator was too hot against the backs of her legs. She was sitting at a desk with her hands folded on a green blotter. The desk was otherwise bare, except for a plastic nameplate at one corner that she didn’t look at, so that the name on it never settled into letters for Andy. Her heart was going fast and light. She was listening to the hall.

Down the hall a door banged, and cold came in under the office door, and then wet sneakers on the wax. The squeak of them reached her late, as though the hall had grown longer while she waited.

The door opened without a knock. A boy came in first, with a wad of brown paper towel clapped to his face and his head tipped back, and a shorter black-haired girl came in behind him with a fistful of his sweater, steering him by it.

Andy knew the sweater before he knew the face. It was blue, and there was blood down the front of it, and a red knit hat had been shoved up off one ear and forgotten there. The boy was skinny, his wrists sticking out of the cuffs. His lower lip was split, and the skin under his left eye had already gone tight and shiny.

The girl was Laura. Nine. Her black hair was in a rubber band that had let go of half of it, the knees of her jeans were soaked dark, and she had his coat over her other arm with snow still melting on the shoulders.

It came back to Andy all at once, and it went through him so hard that if he had had a body of his own he would have sat down. The fence at recess. Snow trodden gray on the blacktop. Laura’s knees hitting the ground beside him. A nurse he had never seen before that day, a substitute, and never saw again, and in twenty years he had not once thought about her. She had been a stranger at a desk, and then she had been gone, and he had never wondered where.

He was looking out of her eyes.

Arabella’s hands came apart on the blotter, and she stood.

“Well,” she said. “Who have we got?”

Andy felt it in her chest before he heard it, not her voice but a flatter, quicker one, an Illinois voice, a school voice, as if it had been asking that question at this desk for years. Only the words were hers.

“Andy,” said the boy, into the paper towel. “Cooper.”

“And who’s this?”

The girl was looking at the cot, and the sink, and the door they had come in by.

“That’s Laura,” the boy said. “She’s with me.”

“So I see.” Arabella came around the desk. “Head forward, Andy, not back. You’ll swallow it. Sit.”

He sat on the edge of the cot, and the paper sheet crackled under him. Arabella went to the cabinet over the sink and opened it, and her eyes went along the shelves: gauze, tongue depressors, a box of cotton swabs, a brown bottle of antiseptic.

“What happened?” she said, with her back to them.

“Nothing,” the boy said.

“He got in a fight,” said Laura.

“It wasn’t a fight,” the boy said. “It was three fifth-graders. They were by the fence, and they were saying stuff about Laura’s mom.”

Arabella’s hand had found the cotton swabs. “What stuff?”

The boy looked at Laura. Laura was looking at the radiator.

“That she’s a zombie,” he said, angrily. “Because she’s real skinny and she doesn’t come outside much. But she isn’t one. She’s nice. She just doesn’t talk a lot.” He breathed through his mouth for a second, around the paper towel. “So I told them to take it back.”

At “zombie” Arabella’s fingers had closed on the box and crumpled one corner of it. At “She’s nice” they opened again. Warmth came up in her chest, slow, and spread outward, and she stood at the cabinet with her back to the room and let it, a little longer than finding a bottle took.

“And did they?” she said.

“No. So I hit the big one.”

“He missed,” said Laura.

“I didn’t miss,” the boy said. “He moved.”

“He moved, and you missed.”

A laugh started in Arabella, low, under her breastbone, and she kept it there. She took down the brown bottle, and came back, and pulled the rolling stool over and sat on it in front of him, which put her a little lower than he was.

“And then?”

Laura shrugged with the shoulder that didn’t have the coat on it. “Then they all hit him. Then Mrs.—” The name went soft, because Arabella wasn’t listening for it. “Then the aide came.”

Arabella took the paper towel out of the boy’s hand, wet a swab from the bottle and touched it to the split in his lip. He sucked air through his teeth.

“Sorry,” she said. “Nearly done. Put the coat on the chair, Laura,” Arabella added. “You can sit, too.” Laura stayed by the wall, the coat held against her front in both arms.

“Let me see that eye,” Arabella said to the boy, and took his face in her hands.

It was so small. Andy hadn’t been ready for that. Her palms went from the boy’s jaw to his temples with room left over, and the skin under the eye was hot and tight against the heel of her hand, and he flinched once and then held still for her.

“Is it broken?” he said.

“Hold still.”

It went out of her. It came from the same place in her chest it had come from with Katherine, and it did not pour. It went slowly, and warm, down her arms and out through her palms, a little at a time, and Andy felt her measure every bit of it.

“Your hands are hot,” the boy said.

“Are they?” She went into him while she did it. Andy felt her go: past the eye and the split lip, past a bruise on his ribs he had never told anyone about, into the boy himself. She took her time there. She went through him slowly, with care, and whatever she was looking for in a skinny nine-year-old with blood on his sweater, she meant to be sure of it.

Then her shoulders came down. Her breath went out of her, long, and the tightness that had sat under her breastbone since the door opened let go, and she smiled.

The boy looked at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” said Arabella. “Hold still.”

When she took her hands away, the bleeding had stopped. There was a small dark crust at the corner of his lip, a smear of dried blood under his nose and down his chin, and the eye was a little pink. She left all of it where it was.

The boy put his fingers to his mouth. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“No. It looked a great deal worse than it was. Noses always do.” She sat back on the stool. “That was a brave thing you did, Andy.”

“I lost.”

“You did,” Arabella said. “That isn’t what I said.”

Laura had come off the wall. She was staring at his face. “It was all puffy,” she said.

“Things look worse when you’re frightened,” Arabella said.

“I wasn’t frightened.”

“I don’t suppose you were.”

She got up and went to the sink to wash his blood off her hands. A small square mirror hung over it, the silvering gone brown at the corners, and she looked up into it for no longer than it took to turn off the tap. A woman’s face looked back, younger than Arabella’s and rounder, with freckles across the nose and brown hair pinned up in a plastic clip. The nurse. Andy knew the face the moment he saw it. Its eyes were green, and they were hers.

The emergency cards were in a gray metal box on top of the filing cabinet, on index cards behind lettered tabs. Arabella’s fingers went to the C’s for the boy, and lifted his card out, and then went back to the A’s. Nobody had told her Laura’s last name. She walked her fingers back two cards and stopped.

“Don’t call my house,” Laura said behind her.

“I wasn’t going to.”

The card was filled out in blue ballpoint, in a small upright hand that had pressed hard enough to dent it. A hand Arabella well ed. Laura Marie Ashford. Mother: Precious Ashford. There was a line below that, and Arabella’s eyes went over it without stopping, and it went soft. Under it, in the same small hand: If you can’t reach us: Carol Cooper, next door, 284 Twin Yews Road, and his parents’ phone number.

Andy knew the hand. He had read Sarah’s letters aloud out of the blue book. Here every letter was careful. He wondered whether Laura had ever known the card was there. Arabella’s thumb went across the last line, once, slowly, over his mother’s name. Her throat shut.

“What are you asking for?” the boy said behind her.

“For what?”

“Christmas.”

“Nothing,” said Laura.

“You have to ask for something.”

A pause. “What are you asking for?”

“Walkie-talkies.”

“What for?”

“So we can talk at night. From my window to yours.” The paper crackled again. “You can have one. You don’t even have to ask for it. They go through walls.”

“They don’t go through walls.”

“They go through walls. That’s what they’re for. If you need to come over, you can just call me this way.”

Laura was quiet. Then she said, “Okay.”

Arabella stood at the filing cabinet with the card in her hand and her back to them until they were done. She dialed from the desk. The phone rang twice in her ear, small and far, and then his mother said, “Hello?”

Andy knew her on the first word. She was young. She sounded out of breath, as if she had run in from the yard to get it, and she was only a voice in Arabella’s ear, a long way off.

“Mrs. Cooper? This is the nurse’s office at the school. Andy’s fine.”

“Oh, sweet Lord. What happened? Did he fall? Is he hurt?”

“A bit of a scuffle at recess. A nosebleed, mostly. It looked worse than it was.”

“A scuffle?” His mother’s voice went up. “Andrew got in a fight?”

“I believe he was defending a lady’s… honor.”

The line was quiet. Then: “Is Laura with him?”

Arabella’s hand tightened on the receiver. “She is.”

“Is she all right? They didn’t—”

“She isn’t hurt.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I’m taking them both home. Tell Laura she’s eating supper with us, and I don’t want to hear any argument about it. I’ll make cocoa.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Arabella put the receiver down. Her hand stayed on it a while after.

“Andy,” she said, “go and wash your face. There’s soap. Use it.”

The boy went into the little bathroom. The door swung to behind him and didn’t quite shut, and the water ran. Arabella sat down on the stool again. Laura was still standing by the wall with the coat in her arms.

“It’s my fault,” Laura said.

“Is it?”

“They were talking about my mom. Not his. He didn’t have to.”

“No,” Arabella said. “He didn’t have to.”

Laura’s chin came up. “So now I owe him.”

Arabella’s breath caught, and held. “Is that what you think?”

“That’s how it works.”

“Not with him.” Arabella’s hands were folded in her lap, and she kept them there. “He didn’t do it so you’d owe him anything. Some people are just good to you, Laura. He cares about you and your mother. You’re allowed to let him. You don’t have to earn that.”

Laura frowned at her. “Everybody has to earn stuff.”

“Not that.”

Laura looked at the bathroom door. The water was still running.

“And you came down here with him,” Arabella said, “with your knees soaked through. You didn’t have to do that either.”

“He’d have gotten lost.”

Arabella’s lips twitched. The laugh came up in her again, and this time she let a little of it out through her nose. “There are people,” she said, “who won’t let you disappear. I think you found one, so you hold on to him. And you don’t let him disappear, either.”

Laura thought about that, the coat against her front. “He’s not going anywhere,” she said. “He lives next door.”

Arabella’s eyes burned. She kept them on the girl. “No,” she said. “He isn’t going anywhere.”

The tap shut off. Laura laid the coat on the cot, folded, the snow gone to dark wet patches on the shoulders, and went past the stool toward the bathroom door to wait for him there. As she went by, Arabella’s hand came up and came down on her head.

It stayed there. Andy felt her hair under the palm, still cold from outside and damp at the crown, and the rubber band, and under all of it the shape of her head, small and warm. Laura stopped. She didn’t duck away. She stood under the hand and turned her face up, and looked at Arabella with that long, frank look of hers, and let it stay.

Arabella wasn’t breathing. Her eyes spilled over, and she let them, and kept them open. She left the hand where it was, and kept it still, for as long as the girl would let her. The bathroom door opened. The boy came out with his face scrubbed pink and water down the front of his sweater, and the hand lifted, and Laura went to him. They sat on the cot together, on the paper sheet, with the coat between them. Laura looked at his lip. “You still missed,” she said.

“He moved.”

Arabella went back to the desk and sat down to wait for his mother. The radiator ticked. Out in the hall a bell rang, late and far off, as if from some other building, and nobody on the cot paid it any attention, and she sat with her hands folded on the blotter and watched the two of them until the memory ended.

Andy came out of it laughing. He hadn’t meant to. It came up out of him short and wet and broke off, and he stood in the corridor with the back of his wrist pressed to his mouth and the radiator smell still in his nose.

“I saw her,” he said. Horun was beside the sill. “On the river I never saw anybody. But I saw her. I sat on her cot. She held my face.” He shook his head. “My mom went over every inch of me that night. There was nothing. I thought it meant I was tough.”

The corner of Horun’s mouth moved.

“Sarah put my mom on the card,” he said, more quietly. “She couldn’t do anything else, so she did that.” His throat closed, and he waited until it opened. “And Arabella got to put her hand on Laura's head. She loved her.” He stood there a while longer, until the radiator smell was gone. Then Horun led him past several other openings, and through them Andy saw Laura, again and again.

---

The next memory along was night.

It sat low in the left wall, and dim, so that he nearly walked past it: a porch light that wasn’t on, a front door with light leaking around its edges, two concrete steps, and a small shape on the top one. The door came to him before anything else did. He had stood on his parents’ porch on a thousand nights and looked across the lawn at it. 286.

He had been inside it maybe a dozen times in his whole life. It had never been that kind of house. Laura came to theirs instead—through the gap in the back fence, or across the front lawn and straight in, because his mother had left the front door unlocked for her for years. If the Ashfords’ door was open, you didn’t knock on it. You waited on the sidewalk until she came out.

The light from the edges of that door lay faint across the corridor floor, and it didn’t move. Andy stood at the sill a while before he stepped in.

The night was cool, and the grass under her shoes was wet. She was standing at the edge of the Ashfords’ yard, by the hedge, where the streetlight didn’t reach, and her eyes were on the step. She had been standing there a while. Andy could feel it in her legs, and in the damp that had come through her shoes, and in how still she held herself, as though she had been deciding something for longer than the night had been dark.

Laura sat on it. She was about five. Her arms were wrapped around her shins and her chin was on her knees. She had on pajamas too thin for the air, pale, with something printed on them—stars, or ducks—that went soft whenever Andy tried to make it out, because Arabella wasn’t looking at it. Her hair was long and black and hadn’t been brushed. Her feet were bare on the concrete.

Behind her, the house was loud.

It came through the door muffled—a man’s voice, mostly, going up and coming down and going up again, and a door slammed somewhere inside, and once something heavy that might have been a chair. None of the words came through. Arabella wasn’t listening to the words, although Andy could feel her sorrow, her guilt. But Andy had heard that voice before. He had grown up on the other side of a fence from it. He had heard it through his own bedroom window on summer nights, rising like that, and lay there in the dark until it stopped.

Laura didn’t turn around to it. She sat very still on the step—not frozen, but careful, as if she had already learned that being still was the useful thing.

Arabella crossed the grass and sat down beside her.

She did it slowly, at the far end of the step, not close, and drew her knees up a little and put her hands in her lap. The concrete was cold through the cloth. She kept every inch of the distance between them, and kept it on purpose. It was in her shoulders, and in the way her hands stayed folded.

Laura looked at her. She didn’t startle. She took her time about it, chin still on her knees, with the frank, unhurried stare of a small child, and in the light from the door her eyes were enormous and very blue, taking Arabella in as if she were deciding whether she would do.

“Your mother loves you more than anything in the world, you know,” Arabella said.

Laura thought about that. Inside, the man’s voice went up again, and she didn’t move.

“Do you know what your name means, Laura?” Arabella asked. “It comes from the laurel. That’s a tree. A long time ago, people made crowns of its leaves and gave them to anyone who had done something worth ing.” She let a moment go by. “So your name means you are already worth ing. Before you’ve done a single thing.”

Laura lifted her chin off her knees. “I can write it,” she said. “L, A, U, R, A.” She drew the letters on her own knee with one finger, and the R went backward.

“That’s it exactly,” said Arabella, with a smile. Laura put her chin down again, satisfied.

Arabella waited. The cold came up through the step. Her right hand lifted off her lap an inch, toward the small bare foot nearest her on the concrete, and stopped there, and went back down. She didn’t touch Laura once. Somewhere out on Twin Yews Road a car went by slowly, and its headlights moved across the hedge and off it again, and the dark came back.

Arabella turned her head toward the small face on the knees. “Good things are for you too. Do you hear me? Good things are for you as well. And don’t let anyone make you small.”

Laura frowned at her. “I’m not small,” she said. “I’m five.”

Arabella’s mouth moved. The corners of her lips went up and stayed up, and the sting came into her eyes at the same time, and neither one won.

“No,” Arabella said. “You’re not small.”

The man’s voice in the house had stopped. In the quiet after it there were only the crickets in the hedge, and a dog a few yards over, and Laura breathing through her mouth, stuffy, as little kids breathe at night.

“You won’t ever be alone,” Arabella said.

It came out of her more quietly than the rest. Her throat was tight around it, and the words went out past the tightness one at a time, as if each of them had to be lifted.

Laura looked at her for a long time. She did not answer that one. She put her cheek down on her knees, facing Arabella, and kept looking, as though an answer might still turn up and she meant to be there when it did.

Then the door opened behind them.

Light came out across the step. Arabella was already up. There was no standing up; one moment the concrete was cold under her and the next she was back across the grass, by the hedge, in the dark the light didn’t reach, and the lit step had only one child on it.

A woman stood in the doorway. Thin, in a housedress, her long black hair pulled back, her face turned down toward the step. Laura’s mother. Andy had seen her over the fence a thousand times as a child, and here she looked almost exactly as she did now, and so thin the doorframe looked heavy around her. Her cheek was red and puffy. Her eyes went once across the yard, over the hedge and the dark beside it, and found nothing there, and came back to the step.

“Laura,” Sarah said, softly. Only that.

Laura got up off the step and went in. She did not look back at the hedge. Sarah’s hand came down on her head as she went past and stayed there a moment, and then the door closed, and the light went with it.

Andy understood what Arabella hoped for: that some of it perhaps would stay with Laura, even if she never ed who had said it. The memory ended.

Andy stood in the corridor with his hands at his sides. His mouth had gone dry. “Don’t let anyone make you small.”

He had heard that before. Not in Arabella’s voice—in Laura’s, on the upper terrace, with the baby book open across her laps and the wind lifting the corner of the page. I want to tell you things, practical things, the kind a mother is supposed to say. Be kind where you can. Keep your promises. Don’t let anyone make you small. Sarah’s words.

Arabella had given them to her on a step in the dark, thirteen years early. She had given her more of that page four years later, in a nurse’s office, in a voice that wasn’t her own. And a little farther down the same page, read in the same steady double voice: I have asked Arabella to watch over you, and I believe she will.

Andy turned to Horun. “She never told me about this. Laura. She never once—” He stopped, and shook his head. “She was five. She might not .”

Horun did not answer. He was looking at the step, and he went on looking at it until it had gone still in the wall behind its own small dark, the door shut, the porch light off.

Andy watched it too. He tried to think of a single time Laura had ever said anything to him about a woman on her front step, about a stranger, about a night like that one. There wasn’t one. He would have had it. He had everything she’d ever told him, the stupid things and the important ones, and there was no step in any of it.

Andy pressed the heel of his hand into one eye, then the other. Arabella had sat on cold concrete and told a five-year-old true things, one after another, as though she were setting them down somewhere they’d keep. He didn’t know where a five-year-old kept a thing like that. He didn’t know whether Laura had kept any of it, or whether it had all gone wherever the rest of being five went.

He walked on, skipping many, conscious of time.

---

The last of them was Twin Yews Road at evening.

He saw it from a little way off: a street at dusk, the sky still pale behind the roofs and the trees gone dark against it, and somewhere in it the hiss of a hose. He had the house before he reached the sill—the brick steps, the porch light already on, small and yellow against the blue, the big front window. He had grown up behind that window. His parents’ house. 284 Twin Yews Road, and beside it 286, with every one of its windows lit.

Andy stood at the sill and didn’t go in. He had seen the Hotel from her side all night, and the beach, and his parents’ living room in the snow, and he had stood all of it. This was different in a way he couldn’t have put into words. This was before him. Whatever was in there, he had been in it, and he ed none of it.

He stepped in.

She was standing across the street, in the shade of someone's maple, where the streetlight hadn’t come on yet. The bark was rough against one shoulder blade, and the evening was going cool on her arms, and she stood without shifting her weight at all. Her eyes were on the Cooper house.

His father was out front, watering the plants. Jim Cooper, thirty years younger, broad through the back, his hair still dark all the way through, in a T-shirt and old jeans. He had the hose in one hand and his thumb over the end of it to make it spray, and he was doing the beds along the front of the house one plant at a time, slowly, as he still did on every warm evening of the year.

On the brick steps, at the front door, stood his mother. She was younger than Andy had ever seen her in any photograph. Her hair was brown and down around her shoulders, not up in its bun, and she had a dish towel over one shoulder, and she was smiling. On the step below her, with a baby in her arms, stood Sarah.

Andy recognized her at once this time. She had just been standing in the doorway of 286, years from now, saying one word. Here she was the same age, with her black hair loose down her back and a baby against her shoulder in a pale blanket.

“—just wanted to say hello,” Sarah was saying. Her voice was thin and a little breathless—the kind of voice that apologized before it had said anything at all. “We’re right next door. I’m Precious. This is Laura. She’s five weeks.”

His mother put a hand to her chest. “Oh, look at her. Look at all that hair. Jim, come and look at all this hair on her—”

“Precious!”

It came from next door, through the screen of the open door of 286, and across the street at once. It was a voice Andy had grown up hearing through his bedroom window, and every hair on his arms had it before his head did.

Sarah’s face closed. It didn’t do anything much; it simply shut. She looked toward her own door and then down at the baby in her arms, and then, quickly, before Andy's mother could open her mouth, she put the baby into her arms.

“I’m sorry—I’ll just—I’ll be right back—” She went down the steps and across the lawn without turning around, almost running, and in through the door of 286, and the screen banged behind her.

Andy's mother stood on her step holding a stranger’s child. She held her a little away at first, as if she weren’t sure yet that she was allowed to. She glanced down at the baby, and across at the door next door, which stayed shut. Then she brought the baby in against her shoulder, her hands finding how on their own, and patted her back, and said, “Well,” to nobody at all.

His father looked up from the hose, at the door and then at his wife. She shrugged and went inside with Laura. After a moment he went back to the plants.

Arabella did not move.

Then the big front window was lit, and the dusk had come down further without any time going by that Andy could find. The window was open on its screen for the spring air, and through it, across the street, he could see into his parents’ front room. It was not the room he knew—the furniture was all wrong, the lamp was somewhere else—but it was the room.

His mother was alone in it. She had a blanket spread on the carpet, a yellow one, and she knelt beside it with a baby in the crook of each arm, and she laid them down on it side by side. Two babies a little over a month old, on their backs, in the lamplight. One in the pale blanket. One in blue.

Andy, and Laura.

“There,” Carol said softly. Her voice came through the screen and across the street, somehow. “There you go. Andy, this is Laura. Laura, this is Andy. You two are going to be neighbors.”

The babies lay on the blanket. Then the two small heads turned on it, toward each other, slowly, wobbling, and they saw each other.

Both their hands came up. Small, uncertain, in the air over the blanket, the fingers opening and closing on nothing. They reached. The hands found each other, and closed, and for a moment they held on.

Arabella’s breath stopped. Her heart lurched in her chest, and her eyes filled with tears. Andy had the distinct impression something enormous had just happened.

She stayed where she was, under the tree, in the dark, with her hands at her sides. She did not go any nearer the window.

The memory ran on. The street went dark around her, all the way dark, and the porch lights came on up and down Twin Yews Road and then went off again, one at a time, as if somebody were walking the street turning them out, and she stood under the maple through all of it. Her eyes stung, and stayed open. Next door, at 286, the windows went out. Nobody came across the lawn. Nobody came back for Laura.

Late in the night, two windows of the Cooper house were lit, one at each end of it. Out of both came crying. Two babies, crying hard, in two different rooms, and it didn’t stop, rising and falling and rising again across the dark street, longer than Andy could have counted—until a shape crossed one of the lit windows with something small held against its shoulder, and that light went out, and the shape came into the other.

The crying stopped. Both of them, at once.

The last window stayed lit a while. Then it went dark too, and the street was dark and still, and she stood under the tree in it. The memory ended.

Andy put his hand flat on the wall beside it. He did it on purpose this time. The stone was cool and smooth under his palm, and he kept his hand there and looked at the small dark window in the wall where the street had been.

His mother had told him that one. When they were babies, she’d put him and Laura down to sleep in different rooms of the house, and the two of them had cried and cried and wouldn’t stop until somebody brought them back together. He had heard it from her when he was small enough to think it was a story about two other kids. He had never once asked how Laura came to be sleeping at their house at all.

It came out of Andy barely there. “She stayed. The whole night. She just—stood out there the whole night.”

His throat had shut on the last of it. He let it stay shut.

Horun didn’t answer. He let Andy look, and said nothing, and the silence stood between them as long as it needed to.

Laura had said something, that night in the gardens, after he told her he wouldn’t be surprised if Arabella had watched them at the footbridge. She’d looked at him with both faces, soft and sad, and said: If she did, I hope she also saw us at our best.

She hadn’t been at the footbridge. But she had stood on the far bank in August with one foot in the river, and held a bleeding boy’s face in a nurse’s office in December, and sat on cold concrete in the dark, and stood under a maple across the street until the last light on Twin Yews Road went out. And how many more times like that she had stayed, watching over Laura, striving to keep her promise, loving her from afar like a daughter, in all the memories he didn't have the time to visit?

He would tell Laura. He didn’t know yet how you told somebody a thing like that, or where you would even start. But he would.

---

After a while, Andy took his hand off the stone. Past the window the walls went on, and the rooms in them changed. The street was gone. The clothes in the walls turned older, cut in ways Andy had only ever seen in his parents’ photo albums, and the faces were strangers again, men and women he had never seen, laughing at tables in rooms that were the Hotel’s and not his, as if Twin Yews Road had never been in the wall at all.

Horun walked on, and Andy followed him. The seasons had gone on past the street, one after another, strangers in every one, and he had stopped reading them. Then Horun slowed beside an opening on the right. There was a woman in it crying out, low and then high and then low again, and other women’s voices around her, and before the sill was even under his feet he had guessed what it was.

“This is Greg’s season,” Andy said. He had recognized Marie’s voice.

“Yes,” Horun said.

He stepped in.

Arabella was standing alone in a dim room, in front of a lit picture the size of a window. It hung in the air in front of her and showed another room, bright, with a bed in it, and the sound came out of it a moment behind the picture, as though it had farther to travel.

Sarah was in the bed, propped up on pillows. Twenty-two, her black hair dark with sweat and stuck to her neck, her face gone white and red by turns. She was younger even than at his mother’s door. There were women all around the bed. Marie, at the foot of it, sleeves pushed up, looking a little younger as she looked now, like Sarah did, because the Hotel had kept both of them, and Sandra, that way. Two more he couldn’t place, and took for Colleen and Kimberly, from the names he’d been given. And at Sarah’s side, with one hand on Sarah’s knee and the other gripping the sheet—

Sandra. With her hands.

Sarah’s own hand came down and found Sandra’s on her knee, and gripped it, white at the knuckles, and Sandra let her. Sandra turned her hand over under Sarah’s and gripped back.

“Okay,” Sandra was saying. “Okay, okay, okay. You’re doing so good.”

Marie leaned in over the foot of the bed. “Almost. Sarah. Almost. I can see her—” Sarah made a sound that was hardly a voice at all, and bore down, and then there was another voice in the room, small and enormous at once.

The baby came out screaming.

“She’s angry,” one of the women said—it had to be Colleen—half laughing, half crying. “She’s angry, she’s perfect, angry means perfect—”

Marie dragged her cardigan off over her head and wrapped the baby in it, and held her, just for a minute, red and furious and wet against the wool, while Kimberly bent over Sarah. Then they gave her to Sarah.

Sarah didn’t say anything. She just looked. She looked at the baby on her chest as if it were the only real thing in the room, her eyes were full of tears, and her arms closed around her, and didn’t open.

“Laura,” she said, and her voice caught. She said it again. And again. As if it were the only word left.

The room went loud around her. Kimberly was laughing with both hands over her mouth. “Oh, she’s got lungs on her, listen to her—” Marie said the name back, “Laura,” trying it, laughing and crying at once, and Colleen sat down hard on the end of the bed, as if her knees had decided it for her, and wiped her face with her wrist. Sandra put her forehead down against the mattress beside Sarah’s knee and stayed there, her shoulders going, one hand still holding the sheet.

Arabella turned away from the bright picture to the dim room—a desk, the edge of a chair, a dark window—and her hand came down on the edge of the desk and held it. Her breath had gone ragged in her chest. Andy wanted, more than he had wanted anything all night, to turn back and keep looking at Laura, and he was facing a dark window with Arabella’s hand on a desk, and behind them both, small and far and late, Sarah’s voice went on saying the name.

When she turned back, it was later. Nothing marked the place where the time had gone. The bright room in the picture had gone quiet. Somebody had dimmed a lamp. The women had drawn back from the bed, and Sarah lay propped on her pillows with the baby asleep on her chest, both of her arms still closed around her, her eyes half shut. Sandra sat on the floor against the wall with her knees up. Marie was folding a towel at the foot of the bed as if it mattered exactly how the corners met.

Greg was in the doorway. Big through the shoulders, reddish hair grown out shaggy over his ears and a beard he’d stopped bothering to trim. To a small boy he had been the biggest man on the street. Here he was twenty-five, younger than Andy was now. He did not come in. He stood with one shoulder against the frame and looked at the bed—at Sarah, and at what was on her chest—and he went on looking for a long moment, and nobody in the room moved. Sarah’s hand had stopped on the baby’s back. Marie’s hands had stopped on the folding.

“You’d better not lose your figure,” Greg said.

That was all he said. He took his shoulder off the frame. As he turned to go, his hand came up onto the edge of the door, and Andy saw the ring on it—a heavy gold class ring with a dark stone set in the top, catching the light from the lamp.

Andy had heard about that ring. He had never once looked at it closely, and he would have picked it out of a hundred. He grabbed my hair, and his ring caught the edge of my jaw. Laura at eleven, halfway out a window, trying to get away from him. There was blood. A lot of it.

The door pulled shut behind Greg. It didn’t slam. It just closed, and the sound of it reached Arabella a moment late, out of the picture, and he didn’t come back.

For a while nobody in the bright room did anything. Then Sarah’s hand began to move again on the baby’s back, small circles, slow, and she didn’t look at the door. Marie put the towel down. Sandra, on the floor against the wall, had turned her face away toward the corner, and Arabella’s eyes stayed on her there, and didn’t leave. The memory ended.

Andy stood in the corridor and found he had taken a step toward the wall. He didn’t taking it.

Andy couldn’t keep his voice down. “He looked right at her. She was hours old. He looked right at her, and that’s what came out of him.”

His hands had closed again. The ring sat in front of his eyes, gold and dark, as it had caught the lamp. He had grown up afraid of that man, and he had never once in his life seen him young.

---

Horun stood quietly beside the opening. In the wall behind him the room in the picture had gone still: a lamp, a bed, a closed door.

Andy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The memory beside it was the same night. He could see that from the light alone—the same lamplit dark, later. He stepped in before he could think better of it.

It was an office, and it was hers. That came to him before anything else: the desk, a window behind it full of black night with the sea somewhere at the bottom of it, a clock going on the wall. The same clock. He had heard it tick in the silence after she told them this, with Laura’s hands crushing his.

She was alone in it at first, standing behind the desk with the lamp low, and she had been standing there a while. Her hands were flat on the wood. Her eyes were on the door, and the room around the door had gone soft and dim, and the door was sharp.

Greg came in alone. He didn’t knock. He shut the door behind him and stood in the lamplight in front of the desk as if the room were his, and this time Arabella was looking straight at him, so Andy saw all of him. The reddish hair grown shaggy over his ears. The beard gone ragged on his jaw. The heavy shoulders, already starting to soften. He had been drinking; Andy could smell it on him from across the desk, sour and sweet at once. Twenty-five years old. The ring was on his right hand, and the right hand was flat on her desk.

Greg leaned his weight on that hand. “When this is over. When I go home. Does it have to come with me?”

Arabella said nothing.

“The kid.” He said it as if she had been slow on purpose. “Can it stay here? You’ve got a whole building. You’ve got people for everything. I didn’t sign up for a kid. Nobody said anything about a kid.”

Arabella was still for a long moment. Her hands lay on the desk in front of her, open. When she spoke, her voice came up through her chest, level and quiet, and Andy felt the anger she carefully concealed as every word of it go out of her.

“A child conceived and born inside the Hotel is not an ordinary child, Greg,” she said. “She has a path ahead of her that has already been set in motion.”

Greg’s mouth opened. She didn’t stop for it.

“The Producers take an interest in such children,” Arabella said. “Anything done to obstruct that path—abandonment, harm, removal—would be noticed. And I assure you, you do not wish to be noticed by these parties, Greg.”

Arabella watched Greg’s face while she said it. Andy saw it land. Greg’s jaw set. His eyes went flat, and then sharp, and then flat again, and his hand came up off the desk and closed at his side. He heard her out to the last word. He did not ask her what she meant. Men like Greg rarely do, she had said, thirty years on, in a room like this, when they understand the shape of a warning. Then Greg turned around and went out, and left the door open behind him, and the clock went on ticking on the wall.

Arabella didn’t move to close it. Her hands stayed open on the desk where they had been the whole time, palms down, and her breath went in once, long and slow, and came out the same way. The hall beyond the open door was dark. Nothing came back through it.

Andy had been standing three feet from him the whole time. He had wanted to come over that desk. He had wanted it with everything he had, and all of it had stood behind her desk with her hands laid open on it, and watched. The memory played on exactly as she had kept it. Nothing in it so much as flickered.

Then he was in the corridor, and he was shaking. It was in his hands first, and then his arms, and then his breath, which came in short and wouldn’t go any deeper. He put his back against the wall beside the opening. The stone was cold through the mantle. It wasn’t the hot, simple anger he’d carried out of Flint’s season, but something with nowhere at all to go.

Andy’s breath wouldn’t come. “I was right there. I was standing right there, I could have—”

He stopped. He made himself breathe.

“I was three feet from him,” he said, “and I couldn’t move.”

“Nobody can,” Horun said. “In there.”

“Yeah.” Andy let his head go back against the stone. His hands were shaking. “I know that. I do know that. He wanted to leave Laura behind. He wanted—”

Horun was watching him. He didn’t say anything about it.

He shut his eyes and reached for Laura. He didn’t mean to. It was just what his mind did, when it had nowhere else to go. She was where she had been all night—right here, and farther than he had words for—and terrified. For a moment, he was grateful for the thinness of the bond. If it could have carried more, he wasn’t sure what she’d have sensed from him. He didn’t want her to feel this. Not tonight.

When he opened his eyes, Horun was looking down the corridor, toward the older light. “There’s more of this season,” Horun said. “Further on.”

Andy pushed himself off the wall. His legs held. “Okay. Show me.” He followed Horun on.

---

The pacing came out of the wall somewhere ahead on the left, heavy and uneven, a man’s weight going one way across a floor and turning and coming back, and it carried down the corridor late, the way the voices had, so that each footfall seemed to arrive a little after it should have. Horun walked toward it without hurrying. Andy kept a step behind him and didn’t ask.

Horun stopped beside an opening on the left. “This is the end of it,” he said. “His season.”

Andy glanced at him, and then at the light in the wall. “The end of it.” He let out a breath. “Okay.”

Through the opening he could see his own room again. It was night in it. The tall windows were black, every one, with nothing of the sea in them at all, and the lamps were lit low along the walls, and the long room was the long room he’d woken up in for a whole season, with every piece of it in the wrong place. A man was walking it. Up toward the black windows, and around, and back toward the door, his head down, his shoulders up. Andy stepped in.

She was walking. Arabella came in through the door of the Suite with Sarah beside her, and Andy was in the middle of a step, her step, light and even on the floor, and he caught up with it as best he could. Her eyes were dry. They stung anyway. Wherever she had just come from, she had come straight from there, and her body was still carrying it in the shoulders and the throat.

The room smelled of whiskey. There was a glass on the floor by the windows, empty, and a bottle on the sideboard that wasn’t.

Greg turned around. The beard had gone ragged on his jaw since the office, and his hair hung in his eyes, and he was flushed high on the cheekbones. He looked past Sarah as if she were a coat somebody had left on a hook, and straight at Arabella. His voice came out thick.

“Where’s my money?”

Sarah had stopped just inside the door. She was barefoot, in a plain dress that hung loose on her, and she stood with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes on the floor, and she didn’t come any farther into the room. Arabella didn’t look at her face. Andy tried to make her, and her eyes went everywhere else—to the glass, to the bottle, to Greg—and never once to Sarah’s face, as though it were the one thing in the room she couldn’t afford to see just then.

“The wish was Sarah’s to make,” Arabella said. Her voice came up through her chest, level, unhurried—the kind of calm that only comes when the thing being said has already been decided. “She has made it. She spent it on her daughter.”

Greg stared at her. “On the—”

Arabella went on before he could continue. “And none of what a Master usually leaves with is coming to you. None of it.”

For a moment Greg didn’t move at all. Then he picked the empty glass up off the floor, for no reason, and stood holding it. The ring clicked against it. “No.” He took a step toward her. “That’s not how this works. I played. I played the whole goddamn year, I did every stupid thing you put in front of me—that was owed. That was owed to me.”

As though they were owed to him, she had said, in her office, all those years later. Sarah did not look up. She didn’t make a sound.

Greg turned on her. “You stiffed me,” he said. His voice cracked on it and went higher. “You stood there and you had one thing, one job to do, and you stiffed me.”

Sarah said nothing. She held on to her own elbows, her knuckles gone white on them. Arabella’s eyes stayed on the hands, and did not go up.

Greg set the glass down on the sideboard hard enough that it rang, cursed under his breath and went past her to the door. He went so close she had to turn her shoulder, and he slammed the door so hard behind him that the black windows hummed in their frames.

Arabella went after him. She didn’t run. She opened the door and went out into the hall, and Andy had walked that hall a hundred times—the long carpet, the sconces, the same turn at the far end—and Greg was halfway down it already, his back to her, his fists closed.

“Greg.”

It wasn’t loud. He stopped anyway, and turned around. Arabella walked up to him and stopped an arm’s length away, and looked up at him, because he was bigger than she was by a head. Her hands stayed at her sides. Her heart went on at the same even pace it had kept in the Suite—Andy could hear it in her ears—as if nothing about this man could hurry it.

Arabella’s voice stayed exactly where it had been. “You will not hurt those women. Do you understand me? And you will do nothing to the child. Nothing at all.”

Greg laughed, short and ugly. “You can't stop me if I do, can you? As long as I'm not... excessive. And about the kid... what? Somebody with a long memory comes knocking at my door?” His breath was sour with the whiskey. “You took everything. You took everything I had coming, and now you want to tell me how to—”

Arabella didn’t answer any of it. She let him run down. “There is a house,” Arabella said. He stopped.

She held something out to him. A plain white card, between two fingers. Andy saw it clearly, because her eyes were on it, and then on Greg’s face as he looked at it. “A house,” she said. “In Warrenville, Illinois. 286 Twin Yews Road. For you, and for the women. In place of the money.”

“A house,” Greg said. He took the card. He turned it over, and turned it back, and read it again with his lips moving. “In Warrenville. What the hell is in Warrenville?”

“A house,” said Arabella.

He was still standing there, reading it, when Andy felt it go out of her. Not the long, steady pour he’d felt with Katherine, or the warmth he had felt with his past self. This was small. It went out of her in one short, exact press, from the middle of her chest straight into the man in front of her, and was over almost before it began. Andy sensed what it was meant to do: Greg would want to live in that house. In that house, and nowhere else.

Greg put the card in his shirt pocket and patted it once, flat. He looked at her one more time, as if there were something else he meant to say, and couldn’t find what it was. Then he turned and went off down the hall, past the sconces, toward the turn at the far end, and he did not look back. The memory ended.

Andy was in the corridor. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there.

“No,” he said.

The torches burned on either side, white and steady. Horun stood beside the opening. Behind him in the wall the hall had gone still: the long carpet, the sconces, a woman standing in the middle of it with her hands at her sides.

“Two eighty-six Twin Yews Road,” Andy said. The numbers had been on the black mailbox at the end of the Ashfords’ drive, the one that leaned. He had looked at that house every day of his life until he was eighteen and left for UIC.

Andy sat down on the sill. He hadn’t decided to. He sat on it with his elbows on his knees and the sword’s scabbard knocking against the edge.

He turned his head to Horun. “I grew up next door to that. That’s—my bedroom looked at that house. Every night. I used to watch for her light.”

His voice wasn’t steady. He let it not be.

Andy dragged a hand down over his face. “Laura living next door to me. It was never luck. It was never—she put her there. Arabella. She gave him the house and she made him want it, and he went, and he never knew why.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his breastbone, hard. “She knew what Sarah wished for. She’d walked back from it right beside her. She knew who was on the other end of it. A baby in the house next door. Me.”

He thought of his parents’ living room in the snow, the night she came to take them back, and Arabella holding her coffee in both hands. Once, with all of them sitting right there, her eyes had gone past every one of them to the side window, and the dark garden beyond it where the house had stood. He had turned it over afterward and gotten nothing.

Andy stared at the stone between his feet. “That’s what she was looking at.” He put his hand over his eyes. Behind it he could still see the card going into Greg’s shirt pocket, and that one flat pat of the hand over it, the way a man checks for his keys. “God.”

Horun did not say anything. He stood with the torchlight on the black half of him and the white, and waited.

Andy took his hand down. “She told us. She told us all of it. Greg’s whole season, start to finish, in her office, with Laura’s hands locked on mine. Made his way to Warrenville, where no one would know him. Where the land was cheap. That’s what she said.” He shook his head slowly. “It was all true. Every word of it was true. And she left this out. The one part of it that was hers.”

Horun let that stand. He didn’t answer it, or look away from it, or offer Andy anything to make it easier to hold. He only stood beside the opening in the white light, his hands loose at his sides, and let it be as true as it was. The silence went on a long time. Andy sat in it, and let it.

He thought of the far bank, and the step, and the maple across the street. She had watched over Laura on that street for every year of Laura's childhood, and before then, she had picked the house. She had put Laura within his reach before either of them could hold up their own heads. And Laura didn’t know any of this. She was up there under all that fear, and she had no idea of all that Arabella had done for her.

After a while, Horun turned his head toward the far end of the corridor. “There’s one more in this season,” he said. “You should see it.”

Andy followed his look. Far down, on the right, a single small light burned in the wall, low and warm, the color of a lamp turned down for a baby to sleep by. It was farther than it looked. Everything down here was.

Andy watched it for a long moment. Behind him the hall still held its own light in the wall, the carpet and the sconces and a woman standing alone in the middle of it, and he didn’t turn around to it.

“Okay,” Andy said. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand and got up off the sill. He knew what it was. What it had to be. “I’m coming.”

He went after Horun, toward the lamp.